Here's what I thought about black holes when I was a kid. Scene: an intrepid soul in a
spacesuit steps from his craft and drops feet-first into the unknown. He is not sucked in;
there's no effort, no pulling involved. He simply falls, like stones fall, like cities fall.
The light reddens, then is stripped away. Finally he is hovering on the edge:
event horizon. If there were light to see by, you would see him stretched out on the
pulsing darkness, relaxed as a swimmer buoyed up by the sea.

Below the event horizon, he keeps hurtling downwards, terror increasing because he knows not
only that he's bound for the singularity (the infinitely dense point at the center, which in
my childhood imagination is a ferocious-looking ball bearing of hot black metal) but that
his image is floating serenely somewhere above. Anyone looking to find his fate would see him
whole, a snapshot in the act of falling, long after he has been
crushed into the hungry core.

Even knowledgeable people think, or thought at least, that black
holes could be shortcuts across time or space or between universes. Jump in: if you're not
pulverized, you might end up somewhere that you could otherwise never see. (He says: "I need
to sleep with her again so I can write another story.") It seems foolish,
risking death for uncertain transport -- wouldn't we rather,
several times over, bear those ills we have? (I'm writing now, because I'm writing about her,
and I never write anymore.) But then --
the lure of discovery, the chance to do the impossible, at only the risk of succumbing to infinite pressure. (He says: "She's a siren. Sailors, stop your ears.") Nobody would ever know if
you made it or not. Still, wouldn't it be more foolish not to go?

She turns from one and takes another, an indiscriminate force.
(Nothing is immune to gravity. That's why we dream of flying.) Her headlong walk doesn't
whisper "want me"; I've memorized her
faces (head thrown back to laugh, cheeky pursed lips, sudden profile shot when anger whips
her head around) and there's no look she gives that says "you are no longer operating under
your own power." But the fall begins, somehow, and you're locked, one after another, in
orbit. You can stay there, falling constantly towards her like the moon falling
towards the earth. Or you can plunge.

And we're mostly not stupid, but everyone's fooled: the figure you see at the event horizon is
not tumbling but hovering. He hangs in space, untouched and whole. It's safe. It's safe. It's safe.